To think our public transport system needs a complete overhaul?

On the plus side, GWR almost always give you some of all of your fare back as they're so late 😂

Sometimes. But plenty of counterexamples.

After Wayne Couzens and David Carrick, the Home Office wanted to make gross misconduct grounds for automatic dismissal from the police, and give chief constables power to sack those who fail vetting. Both opposed by the Police Federation.

Unions may sometimes improve safety for the public, but that's not what they are there for and they are happy to oppose when it suits.

US seems far worse admittedly. Strong evidence that police unionisation causes higher civilian fatalities. And unions opposing self-driving cars even though they appear to be safer. Pilots union opposing post-incident drug and alcohol testing, opposing videoing of cockpits, etc. They are doing their job, which isn't public safety.

We should have the best public transport in the world. Every major city or town should have it's own underground or monorail, and there should be bullet trains between every major city and fast trains to all the smaller cities and towns.

Cycle routes vary in cost depending on what you want to do - Embankment style routes will be expensive but others less so. But then roads for cars are also much more expensive yet people don’t tend to complain about those.

There are some very useful streets safe for cycling that I use that were cheap to create as they just needed bollards to stop the through traffic - they weren’t intended as cycle routes as the bollards were put in due to the dangerous driving, but they have been very effective in expanding the cycle network.

@DdraigGochis right about Copenhagen - Sustrans Scotland also did some research into cycling a number of years ago that found that enabling people to cycle is the equivalent of an 8% pay rise.

Unions save lives. They hold unscrupulous employers to account.

Nurses are unionised too. It's not the fault of the unions that costs spiralled.

Privatisation is the reason for inflation in train driver wages. BR was a monopoly employer (just as the NHS largely is), which meant that it could pay poverty wages to its staff (you couldn't feed a family on a BR wage without working a lot of overtime). Privatisation comes along, the cost of training drivers went up following the Ladbroke Grove disaster, and companies realised that it would be cheaper to poach drivers from their competitors than to train them themselves.

I don't disagree (although profit, really? I mean I suppose those Rapha kit-outs don't come cheap 😂) but retro fitting cycling infrastructure is also incredibly expensive.

As a country we would also need to take a long hard look at our online delivery habits to get traffic off the roads (and the semi-legal motorbikes). Not all of the clogging is private cars. It costs me £12.50 every time I get the damn car out (thank you ULEZ) but that doesn't magically make cycling safe nor fill some of the weird gaps in public transport.

Admittedly I live in an area with excellent public transport which I use a lot, and it's not too expensive. Although it's hard not to conclude no-one ever intended anyone to travel from SE London to SW London without going via the centre.

Public transport outside London definitely needs an overhaul.

Motoring is heavily subsidised. Cars are an incredibly inefficient use of resources. Copenhagen found that the cost of car driving to society is €0.03 per km, whereas cycling results in a profit for society of €0.42 per km. Keeping people healthy and active saves money in the long run.

Assets are not the same as income tax, no.

And the point of a land value tax is to get those who have stuffed all their money into huge estates to pay their fair share. A well designed land value tax is not going to go after someone's primary residence, unless it's a Jacobean mansion with 300 acres.

We live in one of the most unequal countries for land ownership in the world.

I can fly to Ireland from Stansted if I wanted for £40 return in November. I went to book return journey Norwich to London later that month and it was £68 which is average cost.
WTAF

I gather that there was a big push to recruit cheaper, unskilled labour on the London Underground in the early 1980s. Then the Kings Cross fire happened, the Underground workers didn't have the training to deal with it, and a lot of people died. So they started paying and training their staff better again.

Of course cyclists buy things, what a strange thing to say. I've done my shopping by bike for years, even taking a trailer when I want a 25kg sack of spuds (I could carry two sacks in it, but I wouldn't manage to use 50kg of spuds before they went manky).

I buy loads

It’s just the same as any other form of transport:

-use car / bicycle / walking as (part of) a leisure activity = spend money on coffee & other refreshments

-use car / bicycle / feet to travel to shops = spend money buying stuff

If we want transport to work better, then the bicycle needs to be recognised as a practical & convenient form of transport for short journeys (1-5 miles). It’s just not used as much as it ought to be due to a lack of safe routes.

I can’t put a figure on how much I spend when shopping by bicycle - it could be anything from a few pounds (loaf of bread type shopping) to much more (clothes or proper grocery shopping). It’s a just a convenient & pleasant way for me to travel to go shopping.

No it doesn't touch the sides when the country is trillions in debt and paying 100 billion each year in interest. Taxing BP at 100% would only bring in 5.73bn and wouldn't last long as they'd simply stop operating in UK waters if they didn't get a big enough return. The numbers are too big to heavily tax a proportionally tiny number of people/firms.

I can get a weeks travel card in Europe for £20-30!

Well Kemble to Paddington, just over an hour, is £13.50 off peak. Great value - I have just checked it. I simply think people don’t travel at times to suit their budgets. Or they simply are not truthful. Many people don’t live near stations! You have to drive to one in many rural areas.

@crackofdoom In London that’s the same as income tax! It’s not going to
work. Who’s doing all these valuations? It’s going to have ability to
pay issues too. If you seriously think punitive taxes will fund railways, you are truly not much good at economics. HS2 is £100 billion plus from London to Birmingham! Can we just get real please. The better off already pay for the minority of what others get!

I live in a town in the south west only 100 miles from London, with a population of around 20k people. Nearest stations are half an hours drive in opposite directions, or a £25 taxi ride. The train in to London (off peak) is £40/£50 return for a 60 minute journey. Over £100 if you want to travel peak hours, Trains from my nearest station are regularly cancelled (I’m looking at you GWR) often with only 15 minutes notice when you are on the way to the station. How can they be that inefficient?

Sack every transport worker and start again. There’s enough unemployed who can push a button. People would be happy with disruption for a period if a better future was certain.

It wouldn't be great to raise income tax any more. Taxing the assets of the wealthy, perhaps in the form of a land value tax, would be good. And, given that BP recently posted quarterly profits of $5.73bn, a further windfall tax on oil company profits would serve to keep nurses from having to use food banks and subsidise a few train fares, wouldn't it.

Live down a rural branch line? In the UK, you probably have a few trains per day. In France there might be a morning commuter train to town and one back in the evening, no more

Just noticed that..must depend where in France you are because our local rural line (City at one end, just a small ski resort and mainly cows at the other) has hourly trains to/from the big city, just an inevitable gap at lunch time.

Sub €10 for a single roughly one hour journey (much less on some saver and season tickets), much used by students and commuters.

Disappointing hear that it's not the same in some parts of the Hexagon

Somehow other countries manage it? Did they all practice strict austerity after the 2008 recession?

Luxembourg manages to have free transport because it has a population about the size of Bradford and is a very wealthy tax haven.

But who pays? We're already trillions in debt and paying more in interest than we spend on education. We can't tax workers any more. Rising wages of millions of people to the level of train drivers would drive us into bankruptcy. The answer is more self driving trains (which of course the unions are bitterly opposed to!!).